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Here's a video showing the slightly less exciting version, and a crappy infographic I made showing the cooler one. For the latter, you start by folding the waist in half in your hands, then toss the folded pants forward in the air and catch them about a quarter of a jean away from the cuffs, briefly bring the waist down onto the floor then whip the pants towards you and let them fold over themselves.

BLORDLY DOOT PACER TEST GO FASTER NOISE

Elon Musk did not come up with the word "grok" for twitter's AI, he stole it from my least favorite sci-fi book of all time.

The book, Stranger in a Strange Land, starts out relatively normal for sci-fi, with a man raised by Martians who comes to Earth and escapes the hospital with the help of his nurse Jill. He somehow has psychic powers, which is never fully explained. At first, it is about as sexist as you would assume for a book published in 1961. It gets worse later on.

The martian guy uses a few martian words he claims are untranslatable to English, including the word "grok," which really just means "to understand fully."

Then the book gets strange and hard to follow. The martian guy and the Jill stay at the house of this old guy with random young women that just live there and swim in the pool and have a weird dynamic with him. This old guy is supposed to be wise, but he really just seems like the author's self-insert character.

Then Jill and the martian guy join a circus, Jill offhandedly blames "90% of women" for their own rape, and then she, the martian guy, the tattooed old lady from the circus who thinks martian dude is some sort of prophet, along with several other characters i don't fully remember, form a sex cult and it's supposed to be super profound but it's just weird, and then martian dude gets martyred in a way that's supposed to be parallel to Jesus and becomes an archangel.

With the advent of the printing press, suddenly people all over Britain, who had previously spelled words however they wanted (since dialects were extremely diverse) slowly began standardizing spelling rules. This was mostly based upon the spelling of London English, the way most books were printed. All of this happened WHILE the Great Vowel Shift was occurring, leaving us with a really unpredictable spelling system.

The one general trend was that as pronunciation changed, spelling usually didn't. The "K" in knight was not always silent, but when English speakers stopped saying it, they still left it in the spelling. English also borrowed an insane number of words from other languages, often absolutely butchering the pronunciation but (mostly) maintaining the spelling.

Our current system of spelling is a problem for both native speakers and nonnative speakers. Rates of dyslexia in English are much higher than in other languages, and it seems silly that the current main language of business, science, and more should have such a confusing spelling system, which makes it harder for nonnative speakers to learn.

Is the answer spelling reform? I don't think so.

First of all, most spelling reforms look terrible. Here is an excerpt of a spelling reform proposed by Mark Twain:

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

(Finally, then, after some 20 years of orthographical reform, we would have a logical, coherent spelling in use throughout the English-speaking world)

It would also be practically impossible to get the entire English-speaking world to agree on implementing a reform. Besides, regulating the "correct" use of the English language at all is likely to cause issues. Different dialects of English are all equally valid and legislating grammar could facilitate linguistic oppression.

So spelling reforms are not the solution. What is?

We all stop caring about spelling. The pattern that got us into this mess in the first place is rigid adherence to a spelling system modeled on the way words are often not pronounced anymore. Spelling mistakes are usually closer to the actual pronunciation than the "correct" spelling is. Therefore, if we stop standardizing spelling, we can slowly let it evolve to a system that makes sense.

Would this lead to orthographical anarchy? I don't think so. We have the internet as an example, where people are already far more flexible with spelling and grammar rules, and it is still intelligible worldwide. In fact, the internet would probably keep different dialects' spelling systems similar enough to be mutually intelligible.

Spot the difference:

(ink: KWZ sheen machine, image credit: stationeryramblings)